


to glass the opulent

by starling



Category: Confessions of Dorian Gray
Genre: F/M, Gen, Gen Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2019-09-05
Packaged: 2020-10-10 18:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20532596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starling/pseuds/starling
Summary: On 10 April 1912, Dorian Gray boarded a ship in Southampton, bound for France, Ireland, and then New York. RMS Titanic.Trying to write in the style of the show as much as possible - this episode features an illicit affair, a cursed diamond, a sinking ship, and - if I make it that far - an extremely hot priest.





	to glass the opulent

1912\. The Titanic. It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it, the unkillable man on the unsinkable ship, dying in the icy water only to return as a miracle survivor? Something about it is too neat, narratively, even for me. 

But at the time, of course, it did take me by surprise. I was young enough yet that pain wasn't a novelty and all I sought was new pleasures, diverting pastimes. The Titanic was brand new, and beautiful, and famous, a colossal iron leviathan that was nothing like anything I'd ever seen before. And I wanted to go to America.

It was maybe a day or two into the voyage, and I'd been making new friends left, right and centre – or should I say port and starboard? I was practically walking around the ship with a hand outstretched, ready for a handshake. My face was beginning to tire from all the smiling, the good-evenings, proffering pleasant introductions to anyone who came within range. It was a long voyage, I was determined not to spend a moment of it alone.

The evening I met Mrs Winter, I was hungover. My skin felt stretched out across my bones with agonising delicacy. I felt like one of those insects suspended in amber, frozen forever in a single moment. The lights and colours of the ship were bright and strange and I moved through as if dreaming, or discovering an alien landscape. 

(Usually I despise hangovers – and resent that my painting doesn't spare me them – but every now and then, I have a night so brilliant that I am glad for the painful dehydration, some small way of taking the evening's disorienting images through the day, a talisman to prove it was all real.)

I'd been seated at a table with Mrs Winter, her husband, another couple Mr and Mrs Ashford, and a peculiar old spinster, Miss Jones. I'd mostly dozed half-conscious through the meal, for once allowing my sociable facade to drift. But of course, I'd been watching my dining companions.

Initially I thought it was Matthew Winter who would interest me. He had a peculiar melancholy about him, as though he alone knew about some great tragedy that he would not presume to trouble us with. Naturally this endeared me to him, although I think his lovely young wife merely found it tiresome. Perhaps he was happier in former times. I cannot imagine any man could be this morose in the early days of marriage, not to such a woman. 

Where Matthew was moodily attractive – sharp-faced and blond with a receding hairline, often smiling but rarely laughing, and when he did laugh it was a harsh and deliberate bark – his wife was lively, animated, quick to laugh with great abandon, and with the great gift of appearing to be interested in other people. She had a great mess of unruly brown hair, and a funny trick of pressing her tongue against the back of her front teeth when she smiled.

After a hour of conversation, in which I had felt myself becoming less attracted to Matthew with every passing second, I concluded that Mrs Winter must have the patience of a saint. Her endurance was heroic: asking polite questions about the political situation on the continent, nodding encouragingly as he expounded on the wind speeds in the north Atlantic, gasping with excitement about the latest scientific innovations and gesturing to Mrs Ashford, trying to excite some enthusiasm. The Ashfords, myself, and Miss Jones were so visibly uninterested in receiving a one-sided lecture it was spectacular that he did not notice. By the time we were limping through dessert, and I was finally coming to my senses, I realised he hadn't asked anyone at the table a single question.

"I wonder, Mrs Winter, how you and Mr Winter will spend your time in New York once you arrive?" I asked, in a vain attempt to draw conversation closer towards something we could all engage with. To my pleased surprised she shot me a look of gratitude – not completely oblivious to her husband's status as a colossal bore – before starting to answer.

"We shall have to settle down, of course, begin by decorating the new house," she began. "Matthew has taken a job in the –"

"I'm keen to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art," Matthew interrupted without acknowledging his wife. "I hear the Cesnola collection of Cypriot antiquities is really quite magnificent..." And so on it went, relentless with archaeological obscurities.

Matthew didn't know it, but he'd done me a wonderful favour. I shot Mrs Winter a sympathetic glance, and she returned my gaze with an expression of mild exasperation, as if to say, I'm used to it. From that point on, she joined me in silence, and allowed Matthew to lecture in peace. And every ill-judged comment, I would meet his wife's eyes, and exchange a look of mutual recognition.

(Her name was Sarah. I should say that. Sarah, the abnegating sister-wife of Abraham, from the book of Genesis, mother of Isaac and through him, the whole Jewish people. I would later learn that Sarah was a Catholic from West London, some green and pleasant nothing place, mother of nobody despite six years of marriage. And the ‘Dorians’ were a race of Greeks subject to much scholarly speculation who Homer places in Crete, in the midst of the wine-dark sea, while I am an Englishman subject to much unscholarly speculation. Names tell you nothing about nature.)

Finally, we reached coffee - the course signalled we had reached the promised land: the end of dinner, and an opportunity to leave. As part of his overall filibustering, Matthew mentioned a passion for stargazing and I saw Sarah suddenly brighten. I had mere seconds to make a careful calculation – could I really bear another hour of this nonsense? would I be able to get any closer to Sarah or would I only end up hearing Matthew pontificate upon constellations? I wondered if perhaps his wife's brightness was a signal of some slumbering shared passion which I might inadvertently reawaken. 

I decided it was worth the risk. At the very least, it was a chance to ditch the Ashfords and Miss Jones. I spoke up. "If you like astronomy," I ventured, "I do have a telescope in my room. I bought it in Paris. I think it's a clear night tonight, we could go up on deck and see if there's anything to be seen."

Up on deck, I set Matthew to work on the telescope, looking for a very particular star which did not exist, and meanwhile I stood close to Sarah, pointing out the constellations as she followed my pointed fingers carefully with her eyes, ours cheeks only a breath apart, my hand resting on her shoulder. Orion’s Belt. The Pleiades. Cassiopeia. 

Matthew, the poor fool, didn't suspect a thing, and I imagined he didn't know his wife any more than he knew anything about astronomy. From that point on, the three of us were firm friends.


End file.
